Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and Writing Complexity Metrics for the Heathen Illiterate

Swept by overwhelming demand, I now present to you, the masses, the sacred art of writing complexity metrics:

What you say!? You've never heard of this holiest of holy arts? Not a whisper of Gunning-Fog or a faint recognizance of Flesch-Kincaid? You've never even known a complex word! Oh, poor child, you poor, miserable, ignorant fool of a child. How our state's heretical education system has failed once again. Well, gather around then, open your minds, and prepare to release your old, worn-out conventions on the metrics of writing.

What are writing complexity metrics, first of all? They are, as name implies, metrics of writing complexity, or measurements of how difficult your writing is to read, for those of you who don't read at a Flesch-Kincaid proficiency of 12.52 or lower. Flesch-Kincaid? Ah, yes, Flesch-Kincaid, along with a rival metric system called Gunning Fog, comprise the two most widely used and authoritative of writing complexity metrics, although they use alternative metrics and scales.

Now before I begin further, I must explain the counterargument of the vast swaths of heathen illiterates that you'll no doubt hear. Such vermin purport the blasphemous notion that these metrics be used to advance the decreasing of writing complexity in order to broaden its appeal and accessibility to readers. Some even claim that the best pieces of writing are those that possess the lowest complexity scores, and that extremely high scores denote the worst writing possible. These naysayers will utter anything (within their complexity capacity) in an attempt to bring you down to dwell in the wallows of sub-12 scores of Gunning Fog, but do not be swayed - they are the Despoiling Mist that lower your armor class only so that they may possess the required To-Hit to suck the potential for literary greatness from your very soul. Treat them as you would the the evolutionists - tread lightly, and do not be swayed by their lies.

Now that you know of the lies spouted by those filled with jealous wordlust for the writing skills they will never possibly hope to attain, you are ready to cleanse your mind of the tainted and preconceived notions of literary grace, and embrace the hard, quantified measures of greatness made possible only by numerical complexity metrics.

Both the Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning-Fog indices were introduced around 1950, and of the two, Flesch-Kincaid is probably more widely-known and used, being a United States government standard used for many official documents. Flesch-Kincaid, more formally known as the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test, is calculated thus:

206.835 - 1.015 * (total words/total sentences) - 84.6 * (total syllables/total words)

The formula yields a score approximately between 0-100, although, as can be seen from this formula, it is possible for extreme cases to generate scores outside of this range. Higher scores indicate increasing ease of reading, and so obviously writers should obviously aim for the lowest score possible, to avoid even the remotest possibility that
those catachrestic readers (hah, the most ironical of ironies!) will comprehend your words enough to ravage them with gross misinterpretations derived from their pathetically simple minds. From our trusted knowledgebank sources at Wikipedia, we learn that many American 5th graders are able to understand text in the range of 90-100, while 9th and 10th grade high school students are able to read proficiently in the 60-70 range. Not surprisingly, such trivial publications as Reader's Digest and the magazine of Time consistently register scores of 65 and 52 on average, respectively, so it should be no wonder that they are forced to publish a "Letters to the Editor" section with each subsequent issue in order to rectify the gross inaccuracies and misreadings that their audience is confused by. The Harvard Law Review begins to approach respectability with a Flesch-Kincaid readability score in the lower 30s, and it should be noted that they have no need for such "Readers' Letters" nonsense to address the trivial questions inherent of the common rabble.

A slightly simpler, yet harder to calculate system, is known as the Gunning Fog Index. It measures complexity in a similar way to Flesch-Kincaid, using words and syllables and sentences, but introduces an entity known as the "complex word" - a word that contains three or more syllables. Rather than a syllables per word measurement, Gunning Fog introduces a complex word per word, or complex word percentage measurement, to gauge the use of complex words over 1-syllable or 2-syllable words that are easily accessible to uneducated riffraff, and the entire proletariat and lesser bourgeoisie in general. The Gunning Fog Index is calculated thus:

0.4 * ( (total words/total sentences) - 100 * (total complex words/total words) )

The score generated is on a scale of -39.6 to infinity, although realistic values are said to align approximately with the grade level of education required to comprehend the text. For example, a text with a Gunning Fog index of 12 is said to require the education of an American 12th grade student, or high school senior, to comprehend. It should be noted that the Wikipedia article recommends that a "short passage" of 100 words should be taken and analyzed, rather than an entire passage, and that this is indeed what many so-called websites which specialize in the calculation of Gunning Fog indices do. This is grossly incorrect logic, made for big wimps and lesser pussies who are afraid of counting complex words, since this completely fails to give an accurate assessment of the piece in its entirety. One also wonders at the weakness of the article editors who were such pathetic excuses for Wikipedians as to compromise the sacred accuracy of such time-honed metrics out of sheer fear of counting complex words in any sizable length of text. In the immortal words of D.L. Lew, the mantra of word complexity metrics is "Go big or go home." It is cardinal sin to half-ass an article that can be read by the masses, and it is a greater sin still to devise such a compromised metric that can actually be calculated by the weaker-willed.

Fortunately, the age of technology enables us to calculate such tedious counts with great efficiency, even if it is the wholesome work of the Gods. Before you begin your doubts, remember the focus and ultimate goal of the writing complexity metric - to pursue ever greater abstracted levels of language, and ultimately transcend to a state of literary greatness as can only be imagined by a negatively infinite Flesch-Kincaid score or a positively infinite Gunning Fog. The following resources are the automated prayer machines of the commoner's religion - they enable us to forgo the most prosaic of our sacred tasks, and race towards our greater holy eradication of the heathen illiterate with God's Speed.

The four raw statistics needed to compute either the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test or Gunning Fog Index are:

Total Words: This can be accomplished by simply opening your text in a Microsoft Word document, and using the Tools->Word Count tool to derive the number of words.
Total Syllables: While this is not a standard feature of Microsoft's Word Count, there are alternative methods to count the number of syllables. One of the best is http://www.libo.co.uk Simply paste your entire text into the Input Box, set the Syllable parameter to "Count", and select "Examine Text", and it will output the number of total syllables.
Total Complex Words: Another item not included in Microsoft's Word Count, an accurate counter of complex words is much rarer. There is a complex word counter located at: http://www.panix.com/~dhf/fog.html - simply paste the text into the textbox, and click "Analyze".
Total Sentences: Sentences remains the last frontier of complexity count automation that remains, well, unautomated. I have not yet discovered an accurate count of sentences, and so the method of choice remains a manual count, using Microsoft Word's Edit->Find tool to systematically search and count through each period, question mark, and exclamation mark.

These should ideally be tabulated in an Excel spreadsheet, whereupon formulas can be quickly set up according to the prescribed formulas for Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning Fog.

A few benchmarks, for your personal comparison:
Book I: Boulversement (very first piece added to the Tejas Adoxography archive):
Flesch-Kincaid: 73.020
Gunning Fog: 10.767

Hot Fuss: Physics Girl and Ipanema Kill a Whale, and Have a Talk About It (lowest rated piece by Flesch-Kincaid)
Flesch-Kincaid: 79.490
Gunning Fog: 10.206

My essay is a fish. (final high school piece)
Flesch-Kincaid: 38.853
Gunning Fog: 21.682

Self-monstrosity Displaced: Dracula, Unwanted Liberator of Societal Repression (first college piece)
Flesch-Kincaid: 25.412
Gunning Fog: 24.550

Progressivism as, and as a Catalyst of, Liberalist Trends in Accomplishing Both Liberal and Conservative End (highest rated piece by both Flesch-Kincaid and Gunning Fog)
Flesch-Kincaid: 13.942
Gunning-Fog: 28.199

Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, and Writing Complexity Metrics for the Heathen Illiterate (this piece)
Flesch-Kincaid: 47.263
Gunning-Fog: 17.931